Just a roughie from a screencap session. I hope to clean this up soon.
I’ve noticed a slight lack of car porn of my liking on my dash lately. Fixed.
Thoughts on the Yahoo! Thing
First, I love Tumblr and want to keep loving it. And yes, it is immediately terrifying to hear that Yahoo (which, from a lot of our perspectives, is a laughably backwards and culturally irrelevant company) is going to own Tumblr. I sympathize.
But there are a number of circumstances in which this will not be a disaster. Let’s think:
WHY TO NOT BE TERRIFIED
- David Karp is being kept on as CEO for at least 4 years. Karp’s policies made Tumblr what it is.
- Tumblr is only as good as we (its creators) are. The idea that the cultural identity and creations we’ve fostered here have become worth a billion dollars is both inspiring and worrisome. But nevertheless, since we hold the value, we hold the power.
- Tumblr is being kept as a separate company. This is what Google did with YouTube and significant changes were very slow to come to YouTube (though they eventually came, and are still coming). My guess is there will be no significant changes to Tumblr for at least 12 months.
- They’re buying it to become more culturally relevant. They know that controlling the platform will reduce or even remove that relevance, so they would be idiots to do it.
WHEN TO ABANDON SHIP
- If Tumblr requires an account somehow linked to Yahoo.
- If David Karp steps down, no matter what the reasons are.
- If you have to pay to reach all of your followers (FACEBOOK!)
- If Yahoo begins censoring legal images and videos.
- If your dashboard becomes three columns by default.
- If more than 10% of the dashboard is taken up by advertising.
ADVICE TO YAHOO! PEOPLE
- Don’t do any of the above things or we will leave and you will own a billion dollar hole in the internet.
- Drop the exclamation point for chrissake…it’s gaudy and grammatically confusing.
Yes, I do wish that Tumblr (being a more interesting kind of company) could have found a more interesting kind of exit for its founders and investors than the old standby of selling to a floundering company trying to revitalize itself. But I think Yahoo and Marissa Mayer are intelligent enough to not totally fuck it up. Here’s hoping.
- Hank
Succinct.
And I don’t love advertising either but there are two ways to fund media 1) ads or 2) subscriptions. (Yes there are others but really these are the mainstays.) So which would most tumblrs want? I can, and at this point would, pay a subscription fee. Ads, as intrusive as they may be, mean that someone else is paying for our blogging.
These aren’t utopias built for the good of all society to simply exist. David Karp knew it could make money, and I assume, hoped it would. (Heck Edison invented stuff to make money…and maybe make the world a better place.)
So how do you want to site to make the money? Out of your pocket? Or from ad revenues?
Just a thought.
My ideas on how to solve the advertising/subscription problem:
1) Add a “second” Tumblr Radar that generates ad revenue or replace the current one with something that does that. The radar does catch my attention quite often and I click through - which is surprising for me because I actually have an aversion to ads and I just block them out and the Radar is half an ad already.
2) Allow blogs to host ads, similar to how Youtube. Though, shared ad revenue needs to addressed.
3) Allow small businesses or whoever to purchase a domain name through Tumblr. Instead of $15 through No-IP and having to setup a redirect, pay ~$20 a year and have no hassle. I know there are at least a few businesses who use/would use Tumblr like this. Iwould use this. Tumblr, let me pay you for that service.
4) At worst possible suggestion as a last resort, put ads on secondary blogs and require subscriptions to remove/hide them. I’m not too sure on who should do paying - perhaps split somehow between both. Ad-free browsing vs. Ad-free hosting.
My two cents.
Hopefully, nothing will change or they follow ideas similar to these. If change must come, I’d prefer it stay conservative and non-cosmetic. Tumblr Blue must remain a thing.
Before we begin: being confident is not synonymous with turning into an ego driven delusional maniac, just as being humble is not synonymous with being self-deprecating and negative. Okay? Got it? Awesome.
Why should you care about being more…
Read this.
Read “artist” and “art” as the more general term.
This applies to everyone anywhere. All you have to do is bend the words a little to match your specific field. Heck, I even think this can apply outside of art.
What would happen if all of humanity’s thoughts became hive all in one instant? Right now? Would would happen to Trust? Love? Power? Self? Self-worth? Value? Would the Economy actually fall apart or would it simply rearrange? Would terrorism go away, or would it get worse? Would we become more focused and have more meaning in our lives as all of us work together towards a singular goal? Would we be happier? Could we be happier? Are we all already a hive mind and don’t know it? Is the Internet our hive mind? Is it already? Can it be? Would we let it be? Could we let it be? Are we actually fooling ourselves about this and denying ourselves? Or am I the fool who thinks to much?
If “I think, therefore I am,” what would it make me if I stopped thinking about these things? Part of the mob? Part of the mentality?
Are we ants who work for the group? Are we cats who work for ourselves? Are we dogs with consensus of the pack?
Or are we all of these things?
Or are we simply beyond our own words?
I’ve done it
I’ve created the perfect hentai creature
One of my nightmares came true! O.o
holy crap! I saw the picture and thought the comment before I read the comment. Help. don’t
when an artist wants to show you their art
or a writer wants you to read what they’ve written
it’s quite often an expression of trust
because a poem or a story or a painting are often things that come from the heart
little pieces of the artists themselves
and if they’re willing to share it with you
you should appreciate it
last time I saw this I only liked it. now I am reblogging it.
The combination of Titan’s low gravity and thick atmosphere would allow a human to fly by strapping “fake wings” to their arms.
The second-largest moon in the solar system, Saturn’s Titan is the only moon with a substantial atmosphere, which is much deeper than Earth’s. It’s so thick and the gravity so weak, in fact, that you could strap wings on your arms and flap them like a bird to fly. The air is mostly nitrogen, but the rest is mostly hydrocarbons, giving Titan’s atmosphere a thick orange smoggy haze that is opaque to visible light. Cassini studies Titan in infrared light (which can penetrate the haze) and with radar — and in 2004, via the Huygens Probe, an atmosphere probe became the first spacecraft to transmit from the surface of a moon other than our own. Titan is remarkably earthlike, apart from being so cold that water is as hard as rock; in addition to the atmosphere, it is the only place other than Earth known to have bodies of liquid on the surface — lakes as large as the Great Lakes, except that it’s not water: it’s probably methane or ethane. The climate is probably similar to some of our deserts, with gigantic monsoons perhaps once a decade or more, and long droughts between. NASA scientists are working on a mission called Titan Mare Explorer (TiME) specifically to study the lakes of Titan.
Read the full text here: http://mentalfloss.com/ It’s Raining on Titan! Illustration Credit & Copyright: David A. Hardy (AstroArt)
